


the heavy gait of night

by ProfessorESP



Series: Children of Oberon (are heroes) [1]
Category: Girl Genius (Webcomic)
Genre: Faerie AU, Gen, Kidfic, October Daye fusion, the fluff before the storm, title edited 2/11/18
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2017-11-29
Updated: 2017-11-29
Packaged: 2019-02-08 08:28:07
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,999
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/12860703
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/ProfessorESP/pseuds/ProfessorESP
Summary: His Grace, Duke William Heterodyne, invites you to celebrate the occasion of Kay Heterodyne's departure from the Kingdom of Arbeal, to be fostered with the High Queen's court until the end of seven years. Guests will receive a full course dinner and an opportunity for socializing and dance.Or; there's a party downstairs and Agatha isn't allowed to go.





	the heavy gait of night

**Author's Note:**

> This palpable-gross play hath well beguiled  
>  **The heavy gait of night.** Sweet friends, to bed.  
>  — _A Midsummer Night’s Dream_ (5.1 347-348)

It was three o’clock in the morning and Agatha was supposed to be in bed. For the first time in a long, long time, the knowe was bright and loud and full of people. Agatha knelt on the tiny lip above the ballroom peeking down at the whirlpool of colors below. No one was likely to look for her up here. The servant’s passage that led here was rarely used, and she was fairly certain that the knowe would hide the entrance for her, since she’d asked it nicely.

The tall, black granite walls of the ballroom moved back to form a three or four foot ledge before sloping up to meet the bone-white, concave ceiling spattered with fossils. Between them was a short grate that extended along the whole seam, letting through a steady stream of fresh water that clung to the walls as it fell into the shallow pools on the edge of the black ring that lined the sparkling limestone floor. 

The hem of Agatha’s nightgown was soaked through up to her knees, but she couldn’t find it in herself to care. Parties in the Mechanicsburg knowe had become rare after her mother had gone into the wilds, but they were usually loud and full of food and laughing and games, like a street fair that’d spilled out of the mortal world and into the halls of the knowe. This party was different. It was like the ones she’d heard about, the ones that they had in all the rest of Faerie, where nobles wore spider silk gowns, and changelings spun glittering illusions out of flowers and butterfly wings, and everyone danced in the eternal twilight of the Summerlands, where dawn could never touch them. For the first time, she understood how the glittering courts of mortal fairy tales came to be. 

“Shouldn’t you be in bed?” 

Agatha turned to watch Kay step out of the hidden door. He’d lost his shoes at some point during the night, probably left to be tripped over in the servant’s halls. The water trickled through his toes, soaking the hems of his slightly-too-long pants.

“Shouldn’t you be down with Dad?” she asked, grinning at him, and only smiled wider when he grinned back.

“You’ve got me there,” he said, and plopped down next to her with a sigh. “I don’t even know why he invited half of these people. It’s not like I know any of them. They’re not going to miss me while I’m fostered.”

“I think he just did it so people wouldn’t complain that they didn’t get to come,” Agatha said, looking back down and counting heads. There were a lot of Valois here. Dad didn’t even  _ like  _ the Valois. “He is kind of important, even if he and Uncle Barry like to ignore that.”

Kay didn’t say anything, which meant he knew she was right. She kept looking through the crowd, trying to spot a patch of white hair. If the Baroness was here, that meant she’d probably brought Gil, and when Gil noticed Kay was gone he’d drag Tarvek out of the kitchens to go look for them. 

“Do you really think I should?” Kay said, gnawing at his lip. “Get fostered, I mean. Do you think Uncle Barry is right, that it’s too dangerous?”

“Mama wanted you to go,” she said, repeating what their dad had said what felt like every day for the last three months. “She wanted you to get a chance to feel normal.”

“We’re not normal, though,” he said darkly. Agatha didn’t reply, just leaned over to press her head against his arm. That was the other thing that Dad and Uncle Barry liked to ignore. 

The rest of Faerie thought the Heterodynes were just another Daoine Sidhe line, like most of the other nobles in Europa. It was safer to let them think that. If people knew what they really were, what they could really do… Agatha was too young to stray from the knowe, so she hadn’t gotten the gory versions of Dad and Uncle Barry’s cautionary tales, but she knew how potions were made. Blood worked, but the strongest potions were brewed with organs: livers and hearts and tongue and bone. 

Agatha pressed further into Kay’s side, trying to breath in the smell of him. It was harder for her to scent someone’s magic, since she didn’t take after their father like Kay did. Daoine Sidhe like their mother could smell someone’s heritage too, but not with the same pinpoint accuracy as a pure blooded Dóchas Sidhe. She could tell Kay had an autumny flower, maybe a mum, with a metallic taste to it, but that was all. Someday, if she chose her father’s line and burned her mother’s blood from her veins, she might be able to taste the flower perfectly, down to the streaks on the petals. But for now he just smelled like gilded autumn.

She caught the sound of footsteps just before the door to the servant’s hall slid open in a rush and Gil fell through. Tarvek grabbed the door just before it hit the end of the tracks and frowned at Gil.

“Are you trying to get us caught?” he chided, pulling the door so it was only halfway open. He pulled off his shoes and started rolling up his leggings, glaring derisively at Gil’s bare feet and soaked pants. “You three never think to put a Don’t Look Here up. If we do anything too loud, someone is going to notice.” 

Gil just rolled his eyes and plopped down on Kay’s other side. “The only person who’s going to hear us up here is Grandfather, he’s unlikely to care that we’ve come up here to spy.”

“Who’s spying?” Kay asked with a grin. “I’m up here to hide from my responsibilities.”

“Speak for yourself!” Agatha said. “I’m not responsible for anything.”

“Yeah, you just came to lurk,” he said, pulling her towards him until she fell into his lap. 

Tarvek huffed at all of them and closed the door to the servant’s hall carefully, making sure it stayed open a bare inch. He knelt down on Gil’s other side and muttered under his breath in French. It had a rhythmic sound to it, so it was probably a nursery rhyme; Tarvek tended to favor things with a sing-song rhythm when he cast spells. Agatha was just close enough to smell his magic as he set the Don’t Look Here. It smelled like irises and the sky just before it rained. With the stone walls, the running water, and Gil’s faintly earthy scent she could almost imagine they were sitting in an overgrown castle ruin, waiting for a storm to break.

“So on a scale of one to ten, how much do you think the next seven years are going to suck?” Kay asked flippantly.

“Fosterage isn’t the worst thing in the world, you know,” Tarvek said. “It’s a good experience, especially since you’re going to inherit Mechanicsburg. Seeing how other people run their domains will help you be a better noble once your father steps down.”

“Thanks for the pitch, milord,” Gil said, rolling his eyes. He flicked some water at Tarvek, who scowled at him, then turned back to Kay. “Honestly, probably an eight. You’re going from a small, laid back knowe in the boondocks to the High Queen’s court, smack in the middle of Vienna. They’re going to be drilling you on formal behavior for  _ weeks  _ before they even let you do so much as answer the door.” 

“Weeks?” Kay exclaimed, drowning out Agatha’s grumbled “we aren’t the  _ boondocks.”  _

“He’s exaggerating,” Tarvek said. “Your manners tutor isn’t that bad.”

“Still not good, though,” Gil said flippantly. “Honestly, the only reason I’m not ranking this as ten is that you aren’t a blind fosterage, you speak the language, and you’re not moving continents.”

“Or continental shelves?” Kay teased, tugging at Gil’s fingers while Agatha made a grab for his feet. Gil took after his father, a mostly Cait Sidhe changeling, but his mother was from the Undersea, and one of the ways it showed was the webbing between his knuckles and his toes.

Gil shoved Kay’s hands away, but Agatha managed to get her fingers in between his toes, pinch the skin there, and  _ pull _ . Gil shrieked, kicking out on instinct and sending a shower of water droplets down onto the ballroom floor. They all tensed for a long moment. When no cry of outrage went up, they sighed in collective relief. 

“Would you  _ stop doing that?!”  _ Gil hissed, smacking Kay in the shoulder.

“Not gonna happen,” Kay sang. 

“See, this is why Tarvek is my favorite.” 

Agatha laughed as Tarvek turned bright red and shoved Gil down into the water. “You can’t just say things like that!” he hissed.

“Make me,” Gil said, leaning back into the water and crossing his hands behind his head with a smug grin. 

Tarvek made a motion as if to shove Gil off the edge of the ledge, but before he got there the door slid open again, revealing a disappointed looking Uncle Barry.

“I’m pretty sure we didn’t approve a kid’s table,” he said. All four of them groaned. “Come on, up, up. Kay, Tarvek, you have duties to attend to. Gil, your grandmother’s looking for you. Agatha, you should’ve been in bed two hours ago.”

“How did you find us?” Agatha whined.

Uncle Barry smiled. “I grew up here too, you know. Bill and I used to come up here all the time when we were kids to get out of magic lessons. Our dad didn’t usually find us, but we didn’t start bleeding in the water, either.”

He tapped the top of Gil’s head with a small smile. Gil’s eyes went wide and he pulled his foot up to see a small scrape, already scabbed over. 

“You smelled that from all the way down there? How?” Tarvek asked, awed. 

Uncle Barry tapped the side of his nose and grinned. “Family secret. Now, come on, up and at ‘em. Don’t forget your shoes, Gil, I saw that.” 

Gil reluctantly went back to pick up his shoes and socks. Uncle Barry herded all four of them down the passages and out into the main hall, shutting the door behind them with a click. The water ran down the walls here, too, but there were no ledges up above the hall to sit on, just the gargoyles that redirected the water so you could walk through doors without getting wet. The servant’s passage here opened up one of the lantern alcoves. Gil jumped up and bopped the lantern with his knuckles before they all separated: Kay and Gil heading into the ballroom, Tarvek back to the kitchens, and Agatha and Uncle Barry to the nursery. 

Agatha yawned, really big, turning it into a sigh as they got close to her room. “Do I have’ta go to bed?”

“It’s almost dawn, so yes,” Uncle Barry said, scooping her up by her armpits when she started lagging behind. “See? You’re already getting tired.”

“‘M not tired,” she protested, leaning her head against his shoulder. He was really soft, just like Mama used to be before she left. Dad wasn’t soft at all. He was boney all over. Apparently their grandpa had been like that too. It was hard to believe Uncle Barry was his brother, sometimes. “I wanna stay up, play with Gil.”

“You like Gil a lot, huh?” 

“Mhm. I like Tarvek and Kay too, but Gil’s never here, so ‘s easier to miss him.” She yawned again. “I n’ver get to tell ‘im goodbye when he comes w’ the Baroness.”

“I can tell him that for you.”

“You can?” Agatha raised her head to look at him. Uncle Barry nodded seriously. “M’kay. That’ll be fine, I guess.”

She lay her head back down on his shoulder and closed her eyes. By the time they reached her room, she was already asleep. 


End file.
